No dude, not QoS...Bandwidth Saver, the voice quality setting that you configure on Vonage.com. I think you're a bit confused.

No, sir, I'm sure of what I said. If you run the Vonage adapter behind your router, Bandwidth Saver does absolutely zilch. It is only useful if you run your router or pc behind the Vonage adapter. Then it can "reserve" 30/50/90k of bandwidth for voice line.

After all, the only thing that Vonage can control is the its adapter. It cannot control bandwidth of the router. It cannot control the bandwidth of your broadband connection.

Bandwidth Saver specifies the bandwidth that will be used by your voice conversations, and it does this by encoding your audio at different quality levels. At 90k, your audio will require more bandwidth. At the 50k setting, smaller data, less bandwidth required and the same obviously for 30k.

Despite what you may think, "Bandwidth Saver" isn't "saving" or reserving any bandwidth. They call it that because you can "save" on how much bandwidth is required by lowering the voice quality of your calls. And Bandwidth Saver's setting doesn't matter if your Vonage adapter is behind another router...if you have Bandwidth Saver set for 90k, you're gonna use 90k, period, or else you'll hear garbled audio.

You set the Bandwidth Saver setting on the Vonage website, and you set the QoS setting on your Vonage adapter. QoS is what reserves bandwidth for voice conversations, and it has absolutely no effect if it's behind your router. That's what you're referring to, and that's why you're confused.

I'm a little confused when people talk about the bandwidth a call takes.

IIRC a standard, plain old POTS line is a 56kbps connection. So now if I switch to Voip it should take that 56k call and compress it down quite a bit, no? But instead we end up with a 90kbps stream of data?

I'm sure I missed something obvious here and just need someone to beat it into my thick skull.